You’ve got you. That’s it. Everything else is extra.
About a year ago I kept repeating this to myself, a mantra of sorts. I was having quite a hard time of things then — I was suddenly very sick and dealing with it alone and couldn’t understand why. You’ve got you. That’s it. Everything else is extra. I repeated it to myself a year before that, on the resigned end of a blazing love affair, and even some months before that, when my grandmother passed.
To say that I have been reckless would be a bit of an understatement.
The revelations of the past few months — even of the past month — have inspired an elaborate wildness in me that the witnesses of my life are not quite accustomed to. You’re only young once, being the worried wisdom I’ve hung my hat on. Once, if you’re lucky.
—
These gifts then, that I have sent? You don’t need them, of course. They are for the rest of us, to see what you make of them. For me. For us.
—
Ovid
I remember him on a night like this but warmer, the moon shimmying down the black lake. He drinks and wanders from room to room. The blanket is on the floor, breathing softly. Men in exile owe so many letters. Now he is weeping – improbable. Every night around this time I put on desire like an old coat. I wonder from room to room.
Reader I have lately felt inadequate to the task of writing you.
I am including this very average photo of my breakfast — a cinnamon-laced latte and a ham and cheese croissant, snapped on a phone — because I have all but retired my ‘real’ camera and my ‘real’ photography in favor of this mostly artless, haphazard snapping which, for reasons requiring no elaboration, bugs old souls when they witness it. And I’ve retired a lot more of myself that I believed real, that I believed made me real.
My response to turbulence in airplanes disturbs other passengers.
It’s not what you probably think. I don’t go white-knuckled or green-faced or breathless or limp. I don’t jabber or skulk or pray. The opposite, really—though my response may be born of the same awe. When I see from my window the tremoring of wing tips, when I hear the rattling of loose luggage overhead, I laugh. The more violent the tremor, the louder the rattle, the harder I laugh. Come now, I think. Is that all you’ve got?
Keep it simple, someone said to me today.
Good advice. Old. I’ve been struggling with this. I prayed this week, of all things. I prayed that if I don’t possess the bandwidth, the strength, to do it all, please make it clear to me, please help me (make me) trim the fat out of my life. Nothing has become clear to me. I am even mixing my metaphors.
Readers, I’ve been struggling for a while with the question of where this site is going.
Struggling because I have found, as you may have noticed, that I no longer wish to write only about food. Every loved subject must have its own made-up language, a rich set of secret signifiers. This is where the trouble comes for me: food has become everyone’s language. It is omnipresent, the story of our time. It is said that everything worth writing has already been written. I’m beginning to suspect that everything worth writing about food has already been written twice.
I come from a place in California that has been criticized for having no history.
It’s as if the story began there with the houses, the suburbs, the sprawl. I grew up in the last district of the San Fernando Valley to suburbanize. Porter Ranch sits on the very edge of what, for many Los Angelinos, passes for the wild. New settlements are still being built, gauche gated communities of potted palms and Spanish tile roofs, rows and rows of the same house lining up like so many school children.
Posted in All Posts, Etc., Meat
Tagged butternut squash, fall, food, possibilities, recipes, rice, risotto
